Even if you don’t live in the Tampa Bay Are the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) provides consumers with legal protections. Specifically, the FCRA protects all consumers, not just those in Hillsborough County, from being denied credit on falsely reported information.
Credit reporting agencies receive their information directly from your creditors. Their reports consist of historical as well as ongoing information. A bankruptcy stays on your credit record for up to 10 years, but you can minimize its effect thereby increasing your credit score in a relatively short period of time if you follow some simple steps. Following bankruptcy or another dramatic hit to your credit report such as foreclosure your objective should be to responsibly create new credit history, while allowing time to elapse for these events to disappear into your past.
After your bankruptcy, you need to notify the credit bureaus in writing. You need to notify them that they need to update their records and -O- out your balances after bankruptcy. You should include a copy of your “Discharge” and “Schedule of Creditors”. If you don’t have these documents, make sure to ask your Tampa Bankruptcy Attorney You should mail this to each of the 3 reporting agencies by certified mail. Remember that these agencies are not your creditors, but they are reporting information from your creditors. Because you have sucessfully been discharged in bankruptcy, your balances have been erased from your creditors, thus relieving them from updating the reporting agencies of your new balances. All debts discharged in bankruptcy are to be reported as -O-.
If you believe that information on your credit report is inaccurate, the credit bureau must investigate the item within a “reasonable time”, generally 30 days, and remove the item if it is inaccurate or cannot be verified as accurate.
